Intro to Game Theory

Tutors: Will Braynen, Simon Angus

Content (provisional)

1. Why Game theory? When Game theory?
2. Simultaneous Games
   1. The Nash Equilibrium (NE)
   2. Some standard games (Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt)
3. Sequential Games
   1. Sub-game perfect NE
4. Repeated Games
5. Computational Examples (NetLogo)
   1. Games and Interaction structures
6. Applications and Links to other fields
   1. Biology
   2. Economics
   3. Philosophy
   4. Psychology

Additional reading and concepts

1. Aumann's Correlated Equilibrium (CE) concept (1974), which allows all players get higher payoffs than with Nash Equilibria (NE) in some games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlated_equilibrium
2. Von Neumann's maximin decision rule (1928), which results in an NE in two-player zero-sum (and hence constant-sum) games. Maximin is a decision rule which tells you to choose an action that will maximize your minimum (worst-case) payoff. Hence, maximin is a very risk-averse rule and most likely not result in an equilibrium when followed by all players outside (two-player) zero-sum games.

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